June 19, 2006
 Dr. Shelley Wiley, visiting assistant professor of religious studies, initially planned for her May Term class to travel to Haiti. However, politically-based violence in the country prompted the U.S. State Department to issue a travel warning, causing Wiley to reconfigure her itinerary. Instead, Wiley, along with a group of five students and Wiley’s mother-in-law, Nancy Vanderglas, spent two weeks learning about Haitian history, culture, religion, and politics in New York City and Montreal, Canada.
 Large-scale immigration of Haitians to cities such as Montreal, New York, and Miami, began occurring in the 1950s and continues today, largely because of political instability in the country. The class was designed to have students experience how Haitians living in two of these cities continue to keep their culture alive today.
In New York, students visited Hunter College in Manhattan, where they participated in a drumming and dance class with a master Haitian drummer. They also partook of a traditional Haitian meal and visited Brooklyn, where the largest concentrations of Haitians in the New York area reside. At the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the group learned about the slave trade and Haitian immigration and saw actual shackles worn by slaves brought from Africa. A special feature of the New York leg of the trip was attendance at a Haitian Vodou ceremony.
“I couldn’t explain it, it was nothing like you see on T.V. or in the movies” said Jill Staab, a junior from Marcus, Iowa, pictured to the left. “It was the best experience for me. It really opened my eyes to see how different people experience their religion. I probably will never have the opportunity to see something like that again.”
Veronica Munoz, a senior from Sioux City, pictured to the right, who is majoring in elementary education, found the Vodou ceremony initially “really scary.” It wasn’t until she talked with one of the members of the group and gained a better understanding of the ceremony that she felt more comfortable with it.
Other cultural attractions the students toured in New York included the Empire State Building, Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Chinatown, the World Trade Center site, and Little Italy, to name a few.
“Seeing Times Square with all the billboards and how they used everything for advertising, even the trash cans, gave me a lot of different ideas,” said Staab, who is majoring in graphic design and advertising.
In Montreal, the group toured a number of churches as well as the Biodôme de Montréal, a unique combination of four different ecosystems under one roof. And, as in New York, being able to mingle with a variety of people from several different nationalities was one of the highlights of the trip.
“Traveling outside the country or doing this type of urban plunge really changes students,” said Wiley. “They really get their eyes opened.”
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